Lucky Alan : And Other Stories (9780385539821) by Jonathan Lethem Page A

have become accustomed, on the morning before I was supposed to go onstage with the Rolling Stones, causing me to eat Pop-Tarts and therefore to completely fnargle the gig—hey, are you getting this down?!?!”
    “Sorry, yes, if you could just go a little slower, Mr. Dingbat.”
    “I’m paying you twenty-five clamshells a day to take dictation on my memoirs, critic, not to surreptitiouslynibble on those crispy word balloons you’ve got ineptly hidden in your palm-frond satchel!!”
    “Most sorry, Mr. Dingbat, but you really should taste this one, Poacher acquired it in C’Krrrarn, issue number seven,
The Caverns of Despond
, it has something of the dank savor of a truffle mushroom—”
    “Give me that!!! Mmmm, crunch, slurp, crunch, slurp …”
    “Now, try this one, it was spoken by a fair lass from, ahem, my own adventures, and makes a perfect tonic, if I may be so bold, a counterpoint to the first … it has the bite and tangicity of a Vermont apple, perhaps a Pink Lady or a Red Delirious …”
    “Ahhh, crunch, munch, glug, glug … ah, this is hopeless, we’re never going to write my memoirs!!!”
    *
    From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw his sister running in the woods with the rabbit. His sister had grown fur and a small tail.
    From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw his father swimming joyfully with the clown and the critic in the surf. Their three pudgy bodies resembled dolphins and it was hard to tell one from the other.
    From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw his mother in a tower she’d painstakingly constructed out of plywood made from the woven-together heat and stink and motion lines salvaged fromthe panels of the other characters. She was in the upper room of the tower, humping Murkly Finger, who still wore his cape and hood.
    From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw King Phnudge commanding his army of slave Phnudges as they carried his castle forward, brick by brick (bricks balanced on their miserable heads because they had no arms) and reassembled it on the far side of the island.
    From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw Poacher Junebug with his bamboo spear and his wicker sack full of word balloons, returning from another successful expedition.
    From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw Spark Dingbat in his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn. They sat on two tatami mats, a large and a small, woven specially by Spark’s mom. Each subsisted, for the time being, on thought balloons, which they swallowed as soon as they arose, without opening their mouths. It was enough.

The Porn Critic
    Kromer couldn’t operate hedonism but these days it operated him, in the way that a pinned cylinder operates a player piano. What he knew came mostly from books—Anaïs Nin, William S. Burroughs,
The Hite Report
, stuff gleaned as a teenager from his parents’ shelves. Yet in his current circle of Manhattan friends, who were mostly graduate students and legal proofreaders, Kromer played the role of satyr. The more he protested that it was only a single heroin-laced cigarette that had happened to be placed in his hand, or that his so-called threesome had consisted of scarcely more thanheavy petting and a brush with sleep apnea, the more they looked to Kromer as their saint of degeneracy.
    Kromer’s reputation had its origin in the parties he was dragged to by a former schoolmate: a raven-haired, baggy-eyed heiress named Greta. Though these parties were invariably disappointing, Greta invariably closed them down. When a host was reduced to switching off lights and hinting that the sofa wasn’t available, Greta took Kromer on her finishing rounds, often in the rain. Kromer worked nights, so the hours didn’t bother him, and he had nothing else to do. Greta’s legacy, a large trust fund she wasn’t permitted to touch until her thirtieth birthday,